Stylesheet Consitancy

Julian Voelcker

I am currently messing around with various Themes and Skins and notice that there is no consitency with the naming conventions used for the various classes between skins/themes for a particular control.

I would be great if there was some consitency making it a lot easier to switch between skins/themes whilst trying things out.

Cheers,

Julian

Zhivko Dimitrov

Thank you for getting back to us! This is becoming an increasingly important issue for our customers and we have planned a major step forward in unifying the look and naming among individual products from the r.a.d.controls suite with the release of Q2 2006 later this summer. We are already working in this direction and the current release features three skin themes that are supported by all products - Outlook, Apple, and Telerik - I hope that one of these will suit your scenario - rest assures that with the next release we will be expanding your list of options to accommodate the most typical color schemes you may need.

Julian Voelcker

It would be good when proper Themes support is implemented across all the controls - I am currently struggling to use themes to style a site using (among other controls) the RadTreeview and RadGrid and both of these still appear to be hard wired to rely on files in skins folders under the RadControls folder, which is a pain when trying to get it all controlled via themes (that can be programatically changed).

Cheers,

Julian

Zhivko Dimitrov

I hear you on this one! Both the treeview and the grid components have their own specifics in terms of skinning - the treeview skin is mostly about images, so when editing a skin one always comes to a moment when you need to change the image files, located in the RadControls folder - unfortunately I am not sure there is a lot we can do about this, please get back to me if you had something else in mind that would make it easier for you to edit a treeview skin.The grid skinning mechanism, however, is far from optimized and I too agree that there is plenty of space for improvement - I will channel your request to our product teams and check on the status of this to make sure the next release of r.a.d.grid features a control easier to style through the .Net 2.0 themes.

Julian Voelcker

Surely you must be able to alter the location of the images for the Treeview control. This should be a configurable option that can be configured by a normal skin file as well a Skin file used within a Theme - the location of the stylesheets and css files for all the controls should be configurable in this way.

When implemented properly we developers should be able to style all your controls via a Theme and then be able to programatically provide the facility so that end users can chose the Theme that they want to use and apply to all the controls across a site - that is what the technology is all about.

I'm developing a CMS application and want to be able to use the Themes to provide a PC style interface for PC users and then a Mac style interface for Mac users to provide a level of familiarity so they feel more comfortable with the interface. This should be achievable with properly implemented themes support within your controls.

Sorry for the rant, but it does come back to the original request for consitency.

Cheers,

Julian

Zhivko Dimitrov

Point taken. I just talked to our Product Manager and I can confirm that the Q2 release of r.a.d.grid is scheduled to feature a streamlined skinning process with full support for .Net2 themes. We will port all existing skins to the new mechanism and I hope we will facilitate your future integration of r.a.d.controls in custom applications. Thank you once again for the useful feedback, please keep in touch in this form for all issues that stand between you a beautiful r.a.d.control implementation.

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